The passing of the great Queen: A tribute to the noble life of Victoria Regina

“Beckons, and with inverted torch doth stand To lead us with a gentle hand Into the Land of the Great Departed, Into the Silent Land.”

Thither she has gone, the great Mother of a great people; a people growing out like their own English oaks, far and wide, taking broad root, and spreading mighty branches in all lands,--just as her new Empire of the South has been affixed like another jewel to her crown, she has put off the earthly diadem and robes of earthly state and has “passed” into that higher condition of being, wherein all things that seemed sorrows become joys, and where eyes grown blind perchance with tears for lost and loved ones, suddenly see “not as in a glass darkly, but face to face.”

We grieve for the loss of our beloved Monarch because it is a most personal loss,--one which is irreparable, and which will tell on the English Empire for many years to come. But we do not grieve for her death, because we know, not only through the Christian faith, but also through the wondrous workings of Science and its recent heaven-sent discoveries, that there is no such thing as Death. We know that when the soul is ready for Heaven the body drops from that radiant Essence like the husk from ripe corn, and sets it free to an eternity of endless joy, work and wisdom; and we are beginning to learn that all our trials and difficulties in this world, be they the trials and difficulties of an exalted position or an humble one, are but the necessary preparation for this divinely-ordained consummation.

The Queen, our Mother and our Friend, lived her life with a noble simplicity commanding the admiration of the world. She accepted her many bereavements with a patience and dignity which silently expressed to all who cared to note it the purity of her faith in God. Occupying the proudest position on earth, her days were passed in the quietest pleasures,--and she stood before us, a daily unmatched example of the inestimable value of Home and home-life, with all its peaceful surroundings and sacred influences. There was nothing her Majesty so greatly disliked as vulgar show and ostentation; nothing she appreciated so thoroughly as quiet and decorous conduct, simplicity in dress, gentleness of manner. The extravagance, loose morals, and offensive assertion of flaunting wealth so common to London society nowadays, met with her extreme disapproval, and such faults of modern taste have often been set forth as the reasons why she so seldom visited the Metropolis. She was an incarnation of womanhood at its best; as a girl she is described by the chroniclers of the time as being simple and modest, unaffected and graceful; as a wife and mother she was devoted to her duties, and adored her husband and children; as a widow, no more faithful worshipper of a beloved memory has ever been writ down in our annals. As in our old legends the mythical King Arthur was called “the blameless King,” so perchance, in the far ages to come, when we, and all our progress, advancement, Imperialism and power shall have disappeared into the infinite, leaving only a faint echo, like the sound of a breaking wave upon the shore, future generations may know Victoria as “the blameless Queen,” in whose long reign England’s glory rose upward to an almost falling height!

And now we stand, sorrow-stricken, even as the Queen’s own Laureate, Tennyson, wrote of his ‘Sir Bedivere,’--

“The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn Amazed him, and he groan’d, ‘The King is gone!’ And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme, ‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes!’”

The Queen is gone! It will take us a long while to believe it. The solemn and majestic death-march--the rolling of muffled drums--the tolling of funeral bells do not help us to realize it any the more plainly. We read the news, we shed tears,--we think of it and we ponder it, but we do not really yet understand the full weight of the blow that has fallen upon the English Empire in the death of the Queen at this particular juncture in history. We shall realize it by-and-bye; but not yet--not yet for a long while! We cannot believe but that she is still with us; and the black pageant of death, we think, must be a mere bad dream which will pass presently with the full light of morning. It is not for me to play biographer; there are hundreds of brilliant men and women in the land ready to write full and detailed memoirs of the Queen, and to chronicle her virtues, her good deeds, her never-failing sympathy with the suffering and the poor. I am merely trying to express in this brief tribute to her imperishable glory what I feel to be the special lesson of this noblest Woman’s life to women. In a time like the present, when the accumulation of wealth seems to be the chief object of existence, and the indulgence of self the rule of daily conduct, and yet, when despite our exceptional advantages, our modern luxuries and conveniences, so many of us are weary, restless and ill at ease, travelling from one place to another in search of some chimera of happiness which for ever eludes our grasp, is it not plain and paramount, after all, that simple goodness is best? The “old-fashioned” virtues,--is there not something in them?--something sweet and penetrating like the perfume of thyme and lavender in the “old-fashioned” garden? One recalls to-day the words of the great Napoleon to a lady who, deploring lack of energy and enthusiasm in France, said to him--

“Sire, we want men.”

“No, Madame,” was the curt rejoinder,--“we want mothers!”

This is what every great nation needs--mothers,--true good women, content with their husbands and their homes--women whose dearest joy in life is so to influence their sons that they may grow up to be useful, clever, brave and honourable men. This invaluable influence of pure and modest womanhood is what England is fast losing. For many of her matrons, especially those of the upper classes, are no longer content to be matronly,--they must have the pleasures, the dissipations, the frivolous gaieties of the extremely young, and the girl of to-day is often brought into reluctant rivalry with her own mother in the contest for the unmeaning flatteries and attentions of men. Our late Monarch has given to women a supreme example of what mothers should be,--wise, prudent, patient, never weary in well-doing, and for ever tender, for ever loving. How sweet it is to-day to remember the little endearing words which she wrote when he who is now our King was a newborn infant in her arms:--

“As my precious, invaluable Albert sat there, and our little love between us, I felt quite warm with happiness and love to God!”

The gentle woman’s heart, then so “warm with happiness,” was destined to know the coldness of a life-long sorrow, but the “love to God” never failed;--never relaxed in its firm trust and faith, and herein was the great light that seemed to spring mystically from England’s throne and spread a halo round England’s Sovereign.

“I am quite clear,” said the Queen, speaking of her eldest daughter, then a child, “that she should be taught to have great reverence for God and for religion, and that she should have the feeling of devotion and love which our Heavenly Father encourages His earthly children to have for Him and not one of fear and trembling.”

“Reverence for God!” No one will deny that the Queen in the closing years of her long and splendid reign must have seen this reverence dying out and that her heart must often have been surcharged with weeping when she considered the great change that has come over modern thought and modern life since she first ascended the throne, a shy, pretty little girl, with all England waiting to do her homage. She must have noticed a complete departure from old ways and customs which, however simple they were, certainly did mark English women as the Queen-roses of the world, and did so influence men to love their homes and to work for the glory of their country that they were able to leave it greater than they found it. She must have watched Progress marching with swift, impetuous strides in one direction,--but Retrogression and Decay marching as steadily, though more slowly in another,--progress let us say in machinery, but retrogression in men. Who shall count the tears the Queen has shed for the evils which she, with her well-known wisdom and prescience, may not have foreseen coming upon England! Who shall estimate the grief and pain she has suffered on account of the cruel war which has ravaged the homes of a people who are one with ourselves in the Christian faith,--a war which, in her last days on earth, she had to learn was not ended, but rather likely to be prolonged! Noble-hearted, deeply God-loving woman as she was, her beautiful spirit on the verge of eternal glory, must have often contemplated the dark clouds on England’s horizon with the most poignant and tender sorrow, and her anxiety for the many difficulties likely to surround her son, our King, must have been acute and pitiful indeed. For there can be no doubt that much of the peace of Europe was the result of her personal influence; and personal influence is a far more important factor in the welding together and holding of countries and peoples than is generally taken into account by such of us as are superficial observers and who imagine everything is done by Governments.

How many times in the history of the world has it been proved that Governments are paralyzed in a great national crisis, and powerless to avert a great national disaster! How often have the men composing the governing body lost their heads in emergency, and thrown aside their responsibilities in desperate dismay at the suddenly rising tide of difficulties, many of which they had not foreseen! But the Queen’s heart was true; her trust in God never faltered,--and her woman’s hand, so small and delicate, held all things in the clasp of a fearless love and faith such as we are told can remove mountains. One may say of her that she taught all her fellow sovereigns the dignity of sovereignty. There was no German Empire when she first came to the throne. There was no free or united Italy. England’s chief foes were France and Russia,--and may it not be said that they are her foes still? Yet in Russia the personal influence of our late beloved Monarch has been of weight, apart altogether from the ties of blood which unite her family with that of the Tsar. Her personal word,--the benign action of her quiet personal authority--these have smoothed over many animosities which might otherwise have become subjects of hot international dispute. The woman’s word and the woman’s touch are marvellous in their working for good if the woman herself be pure and true! When Bismarck, known as “the man of blood and iron,” called the Queen “the greatest Statesman in Europe” his remark was neither a flattery nor an exaggeration. It was strictly correct. The Queen possessed the two supreme gifts with which God endows unspoilt women, Instinct and Tact. While men with heavy logic and contentious disputes wearily argued pros and cons of various deep questions, the Queen, bringing her quick brain to bear on the subject in hand, easily sprang to a straight issue, and by a word here, a gentle suggestion there, skilfully guided slower perceptions and duller wits out of darkness into light. Her loss means much more than is at present apparent to Europe. The very fact of her sex commanded reverence and respect; a woman’s prayer has often proved more potent than a man’s command!